Serving St Margaret's with Westcliffe, East & West Langdon

In the Dover Deanery, Diocese of Canterbury, Kent

Welcome to our little corner of England!

We are here to reach out to, serve, connect and support everybody in the villages and hamlets surroundingSt Margaret's. We strive to be a welcoming and friendly Benefice and look forward to meeting you on your faith journey.

Looking out...

Delighted to have played host and heard from Dover Outreach Centre at St Margaret's family service last Sunday - it doesn't seem like a year since Vee and Noel came and talked to us, but it was. They were joined this time by Peter, and Vee and Noel gave a really informative and heartening talk to us as part of our service. The work they do, to help people help themselves to get back on their feet, is so valuable to the local community and we are steadfast in our support.

We were delighted with the turn-out to the Dementia Awareness talk on the 3rd January - so many village organisations were represented to be able to take the information out into our community. Our speaker, Penny Reeson (herself a Dementia Friends Champion), gave an informative and thought-provoking interactive talk to us regarding how to enable us to live well with dementia, in all it's forms, or be able to help someone else do so. The information we gleaned will be taken further as we look into ways to make our village a dementia-friendly place to live, work and visit. We will also look at ensuring information on locally available support is easily accessible. To this end, we will be dedicating a page of this website in the very near future to just this topic, to consolidate everything in one reference place.

A 'major incident' - 220 people crossing the Channel since November, so the UK and France will step up Channel patrols. Maybe preventing the organised crime gangs preying on desperate people would be a more effective way of helping those in need. If it wasn't refugees they're shipping, it would be drugs, guns, anything else that they could make money from. If the BBC can find them, surely the French police can. It's too late when the dinghy is afloat.

More than 300,000 people in the UK being officially recognised as homeless is not classed as a major incident.

600 - that's the number of homeless people in England and Wales who died last year, 84% men (average age 44 years), 16% women (average age 42 years). When we did our sleep-out last March the average age for male deaths was 47, women 44. While parliament is tearing itself apart over brexit and who muttered what under their breath, real people are really dying on our streets. Focus.

Stewardship - it's a word we think we understand the definition of, but it is actually more complex than it first appears. "It's just looking after something, isn't it?" Well, yes it is, but what does that encompass? There is the concept of ownership - just whose is it, that we are looking after? Owners have rights, stewards have responsibilities. There is accountability - who are we being stewards for? It is the careful and responsible management of something entrusted into one's care. It is the foundation of what our church PCC's (Parochial Church councils) do, to strive to sustain and build our church communities. We are approaching a period of change, reflection and renewal, and how we can best utilise and grow our resources, both personnel and financial, is going to be much discussed. Please consider ways that you may be able to enhance your support of our local churches, as we can all take on the role of steward in some form or other.

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